Ask HN: How to identify value and how to create one?

[findingMeaning]

Recently, I've been meaning to do some valuable tasks. What seems valuable to me is never valuable to others. As a result, I end up not doing anything. How can I do something meaningful? Pretty lost after LLMs and GenAI. All the value I could provide is equivalent to what these models do. So I am really trying to find something meaningful and inspiring. Please feel free to suggest as you wish.

For context, you are helping a 29 yo with zero experience in the industry. All this person has is some postgraduate degree in CS and a few internships. Currently unemployed. Trying to break into business or career.

[meristohm]

I'm in my 40s, aimless most of my life, have been unemployed, and these are the actions I find valuable:

-Helping others learn and grow (teaching, tutoring, parenting)

-making useful things and either giving them away or selling for enough that both parties feel like they got a good deal

-gardening

-exploring the land

-hunting

-foraging

-cutting down a tree for firewood, but not just any tree; thinning the woodlot (on land that still has skeletons of old-growth Douglas-fir) all the remaining trees have room to grow big and strong

-learning to communicate with other people in their native language

-helping older folks with their tech questions, again either for free or for a sum we're both happy with (while I have a job with a government entity, I don't work full time or for enough money to support my family- my wife has the full-time career we survive on, and I support by homemaking and being the on-call parent for our school-age child with disabilities, two other actions that are valuable)

I considered a career in software development, but it's too far away from the land. I love to explore- in Richard Bartle's classifications I'm almost entirely Explorer in videogames, but I've finally kicked the gaming habit and my activities are closer to my basic needs, not layers away like the system we're in promotes. Computers are temporary. They're really interesting, but ultimately meaningless. What really matters is feeling at home on the land (including shelter, either in one place or as you go), feeding your body good food from healthy land and water, and being part of a tight-knit community.

As much as I love my public library and reading books, I have grown to accept those as luxurious layers we've made at the expense of other life on earth. I'd be happy with conversation and oral storytelling, given a healthy-enough ecosystem to support me and my community.

[walolla → meristohm]

The calm life is the way to go, I'm hoping I can retire from the industry one day and do only FOSS development as a passion in my free time.

[freeqaz]

Give the book "The Mom Test" a read. It helps a lot with finding ways to "create value" when you're stuck. Combine that with "The Lean Startup" and you can build a quick iteration cycle for testing ideas out.

If you're interested, I'm happy to dive deeper into this. Fortunately these skills are absolutely ones that you can learn! Being technical is the harder bit :)

[findingMeaning → freeqaz]

A read a long time ago and forgot most of it. Isn't it about asking people aggressively using specific questions on their problems because they do not know the pain point themselves? I am recalling things from my memory.

And the lean startup is about iterating fast and being aggresive with iterations and validation? Because small companies have velocity over large ones? Again recalling from memory. Read both of these books really long time ago.

So how do you keep on getting ideas then? How should one identify the domains where the problems are? Everything I can think of seems to have been solved and there are 3/4 products available for that particular problem. The main issue at the moment is even having an idea or a domain to work on. Kinda sad from my side.

[deterministic]

I highly recommend not caring about what others value. Unless the only thing you are passionated about is to make $.

Instead notice what makes you excited. And whatever it is do more of it. It doesn’t matter if it is gardening or reading or painting or whatever.

You might be able to start a business focused on what you are excited about or get a job getting paid to do what you love. That’s what I did. I used to be deeply passionated about games development so that made my career choices super easy. However most people are not that lucky.

So focus on what excites you. And if that is not $ valuable then pick a career that minimises your misery and lets you do what you truly care about when not working.

You can’t force yourself to be passionated about things you don’t really care about.

[findingMeaning → deterministic]

There are a lot of things I find exciting. For example, AI/CV/CG. The field is rapidly saturating, and everyone is coming here.

The problem is, despite knowing most of the background (and already forgetting most of it), there isn't substantial work that I can show to others. I've been here for 7 years now (academia). However, there isn't any output other than a few small toy projects. Every year, the compute requirement grows, and even after having compute, doing something without guidance is quite painful, lonely and unmotivating.

On the other hand, working on a graphics engine is fun; making CG stuff is fun but can't make it like big studios. The best I can do is graphics from the 80s. (Sure, coding an engine is hard and fun, but there is more than just an graphics engine).

It all sounds like an excuse. I do not even understand it myself. Like people do not care if I can make an 80s engine from just driver APIs (GL/Vulkan/Metal/whatever) because it still looks like 80s stuff. This is direly disheartening. And time to make modern ones grows exponentially compared to my current living expenses because I do not have enough money to sustain for more than 6 months.

[deterministic → findingMeaning]

I think the key is to realize and accept that some projects are now so complicated and large that no single person can build it from scratch.

The Unreal engine (for example) is built by a large team of individuals working full time over many years. No single human can start from scratch and build Unreal 5.

Same goes for leading edge AI, space rockets, Linux, AAA games, etc.

However what you can do is to work on things nobody has worked on before. A new type of programming language, an interesting new type of game etc. It is a lot harder to get started because you can’t simply target what has been done before. However you absolutely can make things that others find valuable. Indie game developers (for example) do this all the time. It is not easy but it is doable.

[bhu1st]

Building things that you find valuable gives you a way to put your unique perspective and skills gained from your CS degree and internships into real world. Being hands-on will boost your job prospects or create business for you. I recommend to just get started and see how it unfolds.

[sk11001]

For a start, you can try speaking about real things - are you working? are you selling something? are you running a business? what do you want?

[findingMeaning → sk11001]

Currently Unemployed. Yes, would love to sell something but don’t know how to start.

[simon_acca]

Github issues are an infinite well of tasks that people find valuable, and they make for a great portfolio too

[simon_acca → simon_acca]

I meant Github issues of open source projects, maybe it's not so obvious :)

[snyena]

If they are willing to pay you for it I think you are on the right track.

[VoodooJuJu]

Live and work in the value. Like in industry. Only way to know. The years of coming up with cool things and just building cool shit are over. You need to know exactly who you're selling to, exactly what problem it solves, and exactly how much they're willing to pay.

[walolla]

Meaningful is often a very flexible term, depending on the situation and the circumstances it's definition can change a lot. For example, when working in a small start-up the development velocity is crucial, because you have limited resources and no revenue to support you, so building something that works is more important than building it perfectly. It's a very generic explanation, but what I'm trying to say, is that there are always reasons for everything and they often form a long chain of causes, that are hard to see sometimes. But let's try to tackle some of your concerns.

Finding a job right now, especially without a lot of experience is hard, in my understanding, the main reason is that the companies at the moment are not ready to invest a lot of resources in new developers and would rather find someone with experience. If you are looking for job, try making something practical, like a pet-project, that would show your skills directly. Find some people with more experience, first of all, you can learn from them and secondly, they can reference you as someone they know, who might be a good fit in their company, that level of trust can be very important and help you a lot. And of course, keep learning, there will always be something you don't know and it's okay, the question is how your approach it, if you are willing to push yourself out of your comfort zone and get more exposure to different things, your opinions can become more valuable.

About AIs and stuff like that, your code is just a tool for solving problems, but what is unique to you is how you approach these problems, how you think about them, of course, if all you can do is build CRUDs by following precise instructions it won't be very valuable. Basically, work smarter, not harder, it's not the amount of code you can write, but the reasoning behind it.

Okay, let's say you landed a job, congrats, but you still feel useless. In such cases, for me, it's always communication, in a decent team you should be rewarded for asking "how can I be better?" or "what should I do differently?", because it means that you want to grow and be better, therefore providing more value to the company. Don't be afraid to talk to people, ask for advice and learn from their mistakes.

I'm sure you will get there, just don't stop trying to improve yourself and your surroundings, at some point, hopefully soon, someone will recognize your efforts and potential value.

I know that this response was kind of chaotic and I'm sorry for that. It's just a slice of my thoughts not long after waking up. If all of this seems to broad and generic, try to specify on one topic, like "but how should I approach X" or "what can I improve in Y", I'm sure you will get a lot of relevant recommendations. Best of luck, buddy!

[findingMeaning → walolla]

Okay! let’s get slightly more specific!

How to showcase problem solving? Especially for someone who is quite methodical about it and mostly rely on what others did. Meaning that the default response is looking into literature to see what others have done and solving after looking through previous examples.

This approach worked so far, but seems like might not work anymore.

[walolla → findingMeaning]

I know that it sounds like a chicken and egg problem, but in my personal opinion, the best showcase is an actual result of a solved problem, for example: "i proposed this approach to team and afterwards our development speed increased by 30%" or "i had a personal problem, so I made this solution and made it useful for other people". Please note that I'm talking mostly about hiring here, as it can be very useful to gracefully outline your prior experiences. But once you're in, it's just natural, you solve problems, you don't hide the results, you talk about it, people acknowledge our skills.

When we talk about literature, of course, it's very important, as it makes learning things faster than just imperial trial and error, but practice and theory should be side by side.

I'm frankly sure, that you've been doing some practical stuff and not just reading about someone's experiences. I mean, it's easy to study and understand how facebook became so successful, but repeating that success is nearly impossible.

Sorry if I misunderstood your point, please correct me, if I'm going in the wrong direction.

[findingMeaning → walolla]

That is a nice response! Somewhere along your answer, you wrote a line > "i had a personal problem, so I made this solution and made it useful for other people"

This was the original motive of my original question. How to validate if someone's personal problems are only their own or there are people who need share it?

> you've been doing some practical stuff

Yes, but these are toy problems that only work on small scale. Currently, anything requires designing a large systems, which is seemed rather difficult. Maybe it's just an excuse to be lazy. Weirdly the projects blow-up with their scope after one/two day and just doesn't give that satisfaction.

[walolla → findingMeaning]

Great! I think I get your concerns now.

When we talk about problems for potential solving there are pretty much always a group of people, I'm yet to see a case where there is only one person, who uses something. Even if you publish your riced-up arch linux config on github, someone will clone it and it's a pretty niche area :). Of course, if we are talking about starting a business it's better to perform a market analysis, thankfully there're communities for everyone. Let's say you want to do some integration thingy for a cloud-based CRM, you can find a reddit page, telegram/whatsapp group, or something like that, where the most involved users are located and just ask them some questions. Of course, there is always a limit of how many potential customers you can attract, but if you're building something small and niche, you probably won't need to spend a whole lot on development. There are many examples on youtube of devlogs or reports from guys, who made some little thing, like a webtool, that automatically checks TLS certificates and notifies you (idk, just a random idea) and with the right outreach are getting some clients. To get more clients you can post on a themed subreddit, producthunt, HN, etc. It may be small, but it how cool if it works!

Okay, scale. Of course, no one expects you to build huge and complex projects on your own. The point is how you write your small ones, how flexible is it? what about performance, potential for scale, etc. Basically, it's a small example of how you personally think about technical problems and solve them. Sometimes companies give you a small test task, I personally once wrote a pdf invoice generator with an API, just a small thing, but it has shown the employer how I do things. Please keep in mind, that you are not supposed to know everything, "Never worked with some specific IAM system?", don't worry, if you are used to learning new things you will quickly pick up what you need.

Once again, it's not the absolute truth, it's just a part of my experience, I'm sure, that other people will have something else to add or disagree with.